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There’s an important distinction here, and that’s separating files as UI from files as API. iOS (and, to a lesser but growing extent, Mac OS) has proven the value that users should not have to manage their own file system, that files as UI is a poorer user experience. You shouldn’t have to worry about where photos are stored in your photo library; iPhoto will manage collections of photos for you and they get stored on your disk somewhere.... This is a good thing, it’s a significant advancement forward in human/computer interaction design, and it’s the model that computing on all platforms will be following going forward. Files as API, however, are as important as ever. Besides being organizational chaos for a user to manage, a file system can be thought of as a structured way of mapping lots of pieces of separate data to a physical disk.

Apple wants you to buy some expensive extra hardware for copying your photos from an apple device to something else. Because only iPhoto knows where and how your photos are stored, you can only use the devices accepted by iPhoto for that purpose. What a great world! And so many people buy that apple crap!

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.-- Sarah Hoyt

It's an issue of tagging and content. Since the filename is often not enough, additional information is required to figure out what goes where. The future is automatic content extraction for searching/indexing of images so that you simply ask for e.g. "pictures of my daughter in Madrid" and the system returns those photos that show that person in that place by means of sophisticated pattern-recognition algorithms.

For some reason this article really annoyed me. While I agree that there could be some improvement to the file systems we're using now, I'm not quite sure how, and every alternative I've ever seen has been, in my opinion, worse - not the Glorious Answer to All our Problems.Files as the UI work, even if it's sometimes annoying to have to remember where you put something and how you named it, which is more than what can be said for the alternatives (which, at best, appear to work with less effort until you want to do something even slightly out of the ordinary, and it will simply not work at all).

Fran went all-out with her reverse engineering of the Apollo Saturn V LVDC board. Regular readers will remember that she was showing of the relic early this year when she took the board to her Dentist’s office to X-ray the circuit design. Since then she’s been hard at work trying to figure out how the thing functions using that look inside the board and components. When we say ‘hard at work’ we really mean it. Not only did she explore many different theories that resulted in dead ends, she also built her own version of the circuits to make sure they performed as she theorized.

Want to launch your own rocket? You'll need a Saturn booster and one of these: a Launch Vehicle Digital Computer.

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer. The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works. It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “fairly bright engineer with low self-confidence and zero practical knowledge of business.” I wouldn’t trust this as the definitive guide, but hopefully it will provide value over what your college Career Center isn’t telling you.

The designers of Go agree with the collective experience of the last twenty years of programming that there are three basic data types a modern language needs to provide as built-ins: Unicode strings, variable length arrays (called “slices” in Go), and hash tables (called “maps”). Languages that don’t provide those types at a syntax level cannot be called modern anymore. (And what’s up with all the languages that claim all you need are linked lists? I’m sorry, this is not 1958, and you are not John McCarthy.) Go strings are UTF-8 because Go was designed by the guys who invented UTF-8, so why not?

"the directory the fundamental unit of packaging""this leads to the convention of using domain names as directory names"

The code still has to be stored in the file system? I thought he said this wasn't 1958.I prefer to be able to have all the code in one directory.And the ability to have all the code in one file (for trivial stuff at least).

I hear some of you, already. Just when you were over with that mess that it is to manipulate the DOM and that sneaky JavaScript language. Just when you learned to love the highly architected Android classes and managers or iOS’s beautiful method naming, why would we be back to that mayhem that is writing web applications? Didn’t we agree that HTML was not, after all, good enough for making real and performing apps?

Whether you like XML or not, we’re stuck with it for a long time. These days, the only new XML-based projects being started up are document-centric and publishing-oriented. Thank goodness, because that’s a much better fit than all the WS-* and Java EE config puke and so on that has given those three letters a bad name among so many programmers. XML for your document database is actually pretty hard to improve on.

No question that XML is good, but it is also bad, and can ugly. The bad I would say is the it is verbose. Part of probably what should have been the spec should have be a standard for compression. The ugly: comments. Basically the syntax for comments sucks.